Bryan Griffen: So I think, from my perspective, that a story from the field, if you will, would really help our audience connect the dots. So can you share an example from Smucker's where you tracked OEE and it turned into real world gains, kind of like, you know, finally bringing down that biggest buck of the season?
Joe Zembas: Sure. A great example from our coffee business. We had a horizontal form fill bagger, making a gusseted bottom bag for coffee.
It wasn't a complex machine. It was like eight servo axes, a bunch of cams, heaters, et cetera, et cetera, on the machine. It ran about 30, 35 bags a minute. Your standard, run of the mill horizontal bagger. It was running about 35-38% OEE when we decided to go focus on making that machine run better.
And, if you look at it from an availability standpoint, there were certain things that that machine required. It required to be shut down to splice in a role of new film and things like that. So there are certain parts of the 24-hour day we were not going to be able to go after. But the other parts, the performance issues, the quality issues we were able to go out and really address.
After about a year of working on that piece of equipment with a multifunctional team, which is a key. You know, because stereotypically, if you ask the engineer, it was a perfect machine, it's just the operations messed it up. You ask the operations, you know, engineering bought the wrong one, and quality complaints, we can't make anything right. You name it, everybody back and forth.
So the great thing is, you get everybody in the room, get everybody bought in to really making it hum, and in doing that and going through about a year's worth of effort, we got to where the one month that machine ran nine 12-hour shifts with no unplanned stops.
Compare that to a 30, 35% OEE to start with, when you have nine perfect shifts, you can put that in the W column.
Bryan Griffen: Yep, that's impressive.